Introduction

For a long time, I fancied the idea of anonymity--or at least, as much anonymity as I could manage in the era of online presence.  I've come to realize, however, that anonymity is not only unrealistic but counterproductive, especially in my chosen field.  I'm an academic, or working toward being one; and in today's market, a struggling graduate student in the Humanities can't afford to remain anonymous.  So this blog is my major step toward not only presenting myself online, but also toward marketing myself online.  To that end, I suppose I'm not only ending my anonymity but going for full transparency.  I've retained something of a nod to my past indulgence in anonymity by keeping my old handle (Hypothetical) and in my choice of profile pic.  Fans of Thomas Pynchon will likely get the joke; and for those who don't, dig a little deeper.  After all, this is the era of online presence.  You can figure out anything...

I'm a graduate student in English at Boston University.  I study the intersections of literature and science in the twentieth century.  I'm particularly interested in parallels between experimental fiction and science (and how the former tests the latter), and in how science-fictional imagery functions as a means for literary texts to work through scientific and philosophical problems.  My dissertation project, which is near completion, is titled "Inanimate Selves and Intelligent Systems: Cybernetics, Science Fiction, and Late Modernism."  It focuses on science-fictional imagery in the works of four late modernist writers: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, and Thomas Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow.  Long story short, I'm drawn to how writers navigate the unsettling territories where selfhood dissolves into impersonality, where consciousness gives way to non-consciousness, and how the human body is both an animate and inanimate thing.  I find such questions interesting not only for the theoretical speculations they provoke, but for the critical and political knowledge they illustrate.  By drawing on the imagery of cybernetics and science fiction, these four late modernist writers imagine alternative experiences to those of ordinary, everyday life, and how those experiences speak to the politics of race, sexuality, gender, and disability.

My new project, for which this blog is named, concerns the interactions between literature and complex science after World War II.  It focuses on how the rise of fields such as computer intelligence, climate change, and neuroscience challenge the limits of narrative, and how narrative fiction responds in experimental ways.

I'll occasionally publish longer think-pieces on this blog, but for the most part I'll limit my posts to comments on new publications in literary studies, the sciences, and fiction.  My previous publications include:

"'Imagine you're a machine': Narrative Systems in Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia," published in Science Fiction Studies 43.2 (July 2016)

"Specters of Communication: Supernatural Media in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow," published in Modern Fiction Studies 63.3 (September 2017)

"'So it is I who speak': Communicating Bodies in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days and The Unnamable," forthcoming in JML: The Journal of Modern Literature (2018)


I can't post these essays online, but please contact me if you're interested and I'll be happy to share them.  I also have an essay published on the website Deletion: The Open Access Online Forum in Science Fiction Studies, which can be accessed here.  If you have questions about my work, or are just interested in literature and science, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.

Regards,
Patrick Whitmarsh
http://sites.bu.edu/englishprofiles/patrick-whitmarsh/

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